Elizabeth Warren, a tenured celebrity professor who jumped into politics, and Barack Obama, an untenured law school instructor, who made it big in politics, know exactly why student loan debt is so high and why their measures do nothing to address its real causes.

Harvard Law paid Warren $350,000 to teach a single course. When Scott Brown brought it up during a debate about student loans, she protested. "I want to talk about the issues. Senator Brown wants to launch attacks."

At the modern university, the tenured celebrity professor who doesn't teach and gets paid is the 1 percent and the adjunct that teaches, but is unlikely to ever get tenure or a decent paycheck, is the 99 percent. But just as national inequality did not happen because a few CEOs receive huge salaries, student loan debt didn't spin out of control because of a few celebrity Socialist 1 percent professors.

The problem is always in the middle. In both the national economy and the campus, the biggest driver of inequality is bureaucracy.

The average ratio is two administrators to one full-time faculty member. In the 1960s it used to be two faculty members to one administrator. The runaway increase in administration has only increased in recent years and it will only continue to increase.

The devaluation of college diplomas is already leading some employers to unnecessarily demand graduate degrees. Eventually we will be stuck in a European system in which everyone has an armful of degrees and no one has a job.

The only way to reduce the trillion dollar mountain of student loan debt is by reforming higher education. Anything else is another cynical gambit by millionaire leftists who use inequality as a political weapon while denying the equality of merit that made higher education into the great equalizer to those who needed it the most.

Last week, Walmart announced that it distributed $3 million last year to charities here, including $1 million to the New York Women’s Foundation, which offers job training, and $30,000 to Bailey House, which distributes groceries to low-income residents.

The letter came days after Walmart announced it had given $3 million to New York City groups, including City Harvest and One Hundred Black Men, out of a total of $1.2 billion to non-profits nationally.

But Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called the donations “toxic money,” and accused Walmart of waging a “cynical public-relations campaign that disguises Walmart’s backwards anti-job agenda.”

Joel Berg, who heads the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, which this year collected $800,000 from Walmart – the coalition’s single largest private donation – said he had no intention of giving the money back.

“I don’t think there’s a single non-profit group in America, or a single elected official in America, who agrees with every position of every donor,” he said.

“We have had it, our constituents have had it and everyone we know in this city has had it with [Walmart],” said ringleader Daniel Dromm (D-Queens), who took ­political correctness to the extreme by calling on charities to return the company’s contributions.

“We have had it, our constituents have had it and everyone we know in this city has had it with [Walmart],” said ringleader Daniel Dromm (D-Queens), who took ­political correctness to the extreme by calling on charities to return the company’s contributions.

Writing yesterday about the IRS’s amazing loss of more than two years of Lois Lerner’s emails (“Where’d they go? They were here just a minute ago!”), I wondered in passing how the Extended White House Public Relations Office, e.g., the New York Times, MSNBC, et al. would handle the news. The Nixon White House, you’ll recall, found quite a lot of the morning’s scrambled on its collective countenance when 18 and 1/2 minutes of audio tape somehow—somehow!—went missing as the Watergate scandal unfolded around the president.

What a godsend to the guardians of our “Right to Know” Watergate was! Day after day, week after week, month after month, the front pages and editorial pages of our former Paper of Record were full of stern admonitions about that egregious abuse of executive power. You could not look at the paper without a synesthetic shudder: Reading it, you could almost hear them licking their chops as their prey—the dastardly Richard Nixon—came ever closer to his doom.

So how does the New York Times handle this extraordinary loss oftwo years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s emails? (“Really, they were here just a minute ago. We were just about to hand them over to Congress when, gosh darn, they just vanished. Damndest thing.”)

This will amaze you, I know, but it is true: the New York Times today devotes zero words to the story.

Here we have a former senior official from the IRS who deliberately harassed hundreds of conservatives groups. She has taken the 5th Amendment—why? What sort of self-incrimination is she worried about? A look through her emails would have the answer. But those emails are, according to the IRS, unavailable because of a hard disk failure. Do you believe that? Do you believe that the agency charged with tax gathering for the United States does not have multiple backups of its business correspondence? Do you? Imagine what the IRS would have to say to a (conservative) business it decided to audit if a request for electronic records was met with, “Gosh darn, we had a hard disk failure, and they’re just plum gone.” Imagine. And why have there not been instant calls for the data recovery folks to get involved? Why? The public, I’d wager, would find all this keenly interesting—if only the people charged with reporting the news would tell them about it.

Maybe I am naive, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those missing two years’ worth of emails does for Obama what the missing 18 1/2 minutes of audio tape did for Richard Nixon.

So how does the New York Times handle this extraordinary loss oftwo years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s emails? (“Really, they were here just a minute ago. We were just about to hand them over to Congress when, gosh darn, they just vanished. Damndest thing.”)

This will amaze you, I know, but it is true: the New York Times today devotes zero words to the story. Take a look at the front page here: Nothing.

Irate liberals took to Twitter to denounce the UNCF donation, just as they protested a New York City hospital for taking a $100 million donation from David Koch. It is not immediately clear why these people hate the idea of providing scholarships to African-American students.

@RBPundit@AP The Kochs dont do anything without a motive and its not to help black kids, you ignorant fuck

More than half a century after the death of McCarthy (and, we had thought, his method of waging politics) Left-wing McCarthyism dominates the discourse of too many college campuses, supposedly the home of learning. Unfortunately, the campus where I teach, the University of Hawaii, is among them. With collective identities of gender, race, and class dominating practically every discussion, both in and out of classes, professors seek to protect themselves from attack from the politically correct through ritual obeisance. Liberal arts education is no longer even slightly “liberal,” (a word derived from the Latin “libertas,” or liberty, subsequently resurrected by the civic culture of early modern Europe). Students are systematically discouraged from questioning the new orthodoxy, sometimes through bullying and sometimes through the threat of ostracism, enforced by “speech codes.” Administrators have at best become apathetic in promoting a free exchange of ideas and have signed on as sensitivity police.

One wonders how much longer students and their parents will tolerate the ever-increasing costs and ever-decreasing intellectual diversity of today’s politically correct campuses. How much longer will Left-wing McCarthyism be allowed to dumb down higher education in the liberal arts?

Because of California's Proposition 209, public universities such as UCLA cannot use race as a factor in admissions. However, as this book shows, UCLA gives significant preferences to African Americans, while it discriminates against Asians. The author, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, documents what he witnessed as a member of UCLA's faculty oversight committee for admissions.

He also describes findings from a UCLA internal report as well as statistics from a large data set that he has posted online. All show that UCLA is breaking the law. The discrimination is not simply a byproduct of class-based preferences. For instance, for one aspect of the admissions process, a rich African American's chance of admission is almost double that of a poor Asian, even when the two applicants have identical grades, SAT scores, and other factors.

The Emerald City may witness the economic dangers of hiking the minimum wage to $15/hour sooner rather than later. SeaTac, a suburb of Seattle, hiked the minimum wagefor certain service industry employees to $15 at the beginning of the year, and there are already signs that the sudden increase is having a negative impact.

At the Clarion Hotel off International Boulevard, a sit-down restaurant has been shuttered, though it might soon be replaced by a less-labor-intensive cafe…

Other businesses have adjusted in ways that run the gamut from putting more work in the hands of managers, to instituting a small “living-wage surcharge” for a daily parking space near the airport.

That’s not all. According to Assunta Ng, publisher of the Northwest Asian Weekly, some employees are feeling the pinch as employers cut benefits. She recalls a conversation she had with two hotel employees who have been affected by the wage hike:

“Are you happy with the $15 wage?” I asked the full-time cleaning lady.

The hotel used to feed her. Now, she has to bring her own food. Also, no overtime, she said. She used to work extra hours and received overtime pay.

What else? I asked.

“I have to pay for parking,” she said.

I then asked the part-time waitress, who was part of the catering staff.

“Yes, I’ve got $15 an hour, but all my tips are now much less,” she said. Before the new wage law was implemented, her hourly wage was $7. But her tips added to more than $15 an hour. Yes, she used to receive free food and parking. Now, she has to bring her own food and pay for parking.

What explains the legislature’s transformation into the dysfunctional body it is today? Some argue that California’s population is now so vast that it is almost impossible for state legislators to gain adequate knowledge about the people and landscapes they ostensibly serve.

Term limits—amended in 2012 to allow 12 consecutive years of service in either the assembly or senate—may also partially be to blame. Sacramento has few experienced legislators. Most lawmakers spend their brief time in office planning for their post officia careers, either by courting lobbyists, making deals with the governor to secure lucrative sinecures as administrative grandees on well-paid state commissions and boards, or eyeing another elective office. Corruption is a problem, too. Currently, Democratic state senator Roderick Wright is on paid leave—rather than being expelled—from the legislature after being convicted by a Los Angeles jury of eight felonies related to campaign fraud. Democratic state senator Rod Calderon also went on paid leave to face more than 20 felony counts of bribery, money laundering, and fraud. The most recent example is also the most shocking: Democratic state senator and gun-control advocate Leland Yee was indicted in March for conspiring to commit wire fraud and traffic weapons.

But a more far-reaching explanation for the legislature’s behavior is that the state became both fabulously wealthy—California is home to more billionaires than any other state—and very poor. Those in between are either marginalized politically or, as we’ve seen, moving out. California today is largely a cartographical abstraction. Two profoundly different cultures and landscapes have evolved over the last half-century and now seem arbitrarily lumped together.

An overclass—much of it living in the state’s most heavily populated corridor, within 50 miles of the coast from Berkeley to San Diego—is doing quite well economically, despite the state legislature’s incompetence and job-shrinking policies.Many of California’s most affluent residents, at least so far, tend to shrug off high taxes, viewing income redistribution through taxation as a sort of psychological penance for their super-wealth. Residents of La Jolla, Santa Monica, and Palo Alto can afford the private schools that are sprouting up in the manner of Southern academies following the court-ordered forced busing of the 1970s. They seek class homogeneity in their gated enclaves, and they don’t worry about the high power bills of the poor residing in the frequently sweltering interior—much less the effect of illegal immigration on medical and social services in that region. They care far more about the environment and gay marriage and other progressive causes than about mundane concerns such as fuel and farm exports and middle-class jobs. They form a cash-laden constituency with enormous pull in the state legislature.